To compress a dataset, you can write your data from dataset to memory stream, then use the System.IO.Compression library to compress. The DeflateStream class uses the same compression algorithm as the gzip data format used by the GZipStream class.

The compression functions in DeflateStream and GZipStream are exposed as a stream. Data is read on a byte-by-byte basis, so it's not possible to perform multiple passes to determine the best method for compressing entire files or large blocks of data.

The DeflateStream and GZipStream classes are best used on uncompressed sources of data. If the source data is already compressed, using these classes may actually increase the size of the stream.